Musk and DOGE Team Reveal $500B Fraud, Push for Trillion-Dollar Cuts to Save America’s Finances
In a 50-minute sit down interview on Fox News with Bret Baier last night, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team delivered a scathing indictment of a federal government drowning in fraud, waste, and dysfunction. Key team members of DOGE, one after the other exposed a system so broken it can’t pass an audit—leaving taxpayers footing a bill for billions in improper payments and exploitation.
Babies, the Dead, and Billion-Dollar Waste
Musk pulled no punches, spotlighting egregious fraud enabled by disconnected government systems. “There were over $300M of Small Business Administration loans that have been given out to people under the age of 11,” he said, adding, “The youngest recipient of a Small Business Administration loan is a nine-month-old.” He also revealed “$300 million to over the age of 120,” despite the oldest American being 114. “They’re fake,” he quipped, highlighting a gap fraudsters exploit with ease. “The computer systems don’t talk to each other,” Musk explained, allowing a nine-month-old to “secure” a loan or the dead to collect benefits.
The scale of waste stunned Musk. “The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government, it is astonishing—it’s mind blowing,” he said. “We routinely encounter wastes of $1 billion or more—casually.” Tom Krause, a DOGE member focused on fiscal responsibility, put it in corporate terms: “There’s $500 billion of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of improper payments, and we can’t pass an audit. “We’re changing the culture … If I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed,” explained Krause. Musk added, “If [a] commercial company operated the way the federal government does … it would immediately go bankrupt … the officers would be arrested.”
Fixing the Broken
The DOGE team’s solution is deceptively simple: make systems communicate. “Very, very simple fix eliminates tremendous [fraud],” Musk said, like syncing Social Security Administration (SSA) data with the Small Business Administration (SBA). Aram Moghaddassi, tasked with improving Social Security, revealed a chilling reality: “At Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information … We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters … Almost half.” Their mission? “The two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis, and also make the experience better.”
Elsewhere, DOGE team member Brad Smith tackled health care inefficiencies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH): “There’s 700 different IT systems today at NIH … They can’t speak to each other. They have 27 different CIOs. And so when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data.” Joe Gebbia, co-founder of AirBnB, meanwhile, is streamlining retirement: “The process takes many months—and we’re going to make it just many days.”
A Trillion-Dollar Revolution
Musk framed DOGE’s work as a historic overhaul—“the biggest revolution in government since the original Revolution”—with a goal to cut the deficit by a trillion dollars in his 130-day stint as a special government employee. “We will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion within that time frame,” he vowed, emphasizing precision: “We want to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once.” Already, they’ve slashed 300,000 federal credit cards (from 4.6 million to 4.3 million) for 2.4 million employees—a bizarre surplus—and are modernizing relics like a 60-year-old billing system.
Corruption and Resistance
Resistance is fierce. Musk pointed to the D.C. Circuit’s “very far-left bias,” hinting at corruption linking judges to nonprofits like Stacey Abrams’ Power Forward Communities, which ballooned from $100 to $2 billion in federal funds. “What does it do? No one knows.”
Why are these titans—rocket scientists, Airbnb co-founders, ex-CEOs—doing this? The team explained, “We have a real fiscal crisis that unless this exercise is successful, the ship of America will sink.” Musk crystallized their vision: “At the end of the day, America is going to be in much better shape. America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work and it’s going to be a fantastic future.”
